Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  From the air Inspiration Cadillac could see how some calamity worse than mere war had struck Faith City. The dome of the Basilica of the Grey Lady (now, he noted, the Basilica of the Total Mortification) lay in shards and slabs on the tiled floor of the audience chamber. The entire east wing together with a dozen hectares of Faith City had been swept away and replaced with a similar area of planted and irrigated maize. The Grey Lady’s private quarters were a fused cracked crater in the rock, and beside it stood the tangled remains of some kind of clumsy three-legged device.

  —What has been happening? War, dread, outrage, apostasy; with a locomotive!

  It was not even a particularly good example of locomotive building skills, Inspiration Cadillac decided, spying it from afar as a line of white steam on the western horizon. A Great Southern Class 27 fusion hauler; tokamaks due a good overhaul. Paintwork blistered and peeled, what was that it read, Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza? Pathetic. Shining silver-bright in the desert sun, Inspiration Cadillac patched in his public address system and chastized his people.

  “0 ye of little faith!” Faces at the windows of the ramshackle carriages. They looked frightened. That was good. “0 faithless and perverse generation! I promised that I would return to you as the Total Mortification, yet not one of you would wait the eight days for the promise to be fulfilled! Covenantbreakers! Idolators! You worship this… Golden Calf rather than the physical manifestation of the Cosmic Engineer! See how I shatter all false idols!” He helicoptered in over the speeding train and raised his hand to hurl a thunderbolt of cybernetic command.

  “We’d all much rather you didn’t do that,” said the train quite unexpectedly. The power evaporated from Inspiration Cadillac’s fingertips.

  “What?”

  The train repeated its statement word for word.

  “A talking train! My my my.”

  “Something more than that,” said the Great Southern Class 27. “I am the Total Mortification.”

  “Nonsense! Blasphemy! I am the Total Mortification, the one, the only.”

  “You are man made machine. I am machine made man. At heart, you are flesh, for you still wear the outward form of a man, but I have gone beyond such anthropomorphic chauvinism. I am machine in the form of machine.”

  Poor Children’s heads poked out of the windows, evidently enjoying the theosophical wranglings. Inspiration Cadillac found his curiosity roused despite his fury and asked, “What manner of creature are you?”

  “Take a look in my liveried carriage,” the train replied. Inspiration Cadillac retracted his rotors and made a jet-power landing on the paintpeeling roof. He extended a telescopic camera eye over the edge to peer in. The windows were thick with cobwebs and dirt, as was the carriage itself; dust, cobwebs, age and neglect. In the center of the carriage sat a cracked leather armchair and in the armchair sat a mummified corpse. Upon the corpse’s head was a metal diadam of peculiar and intricate design.

  “Adam Black that was,” said the train. “When his soul passed to me, I sealed the carriage, never to be opened again. All that the carriage represents is past me now, I am a machine/man, the true future man, the Total Mortification if you wish. For many years I travelled the railroads of the world searching for some purpose for my spiritual identity, then I heard of the Dumbletonians of Desolation Road, a place I knew well in my fleshly incarnation, and my heart told me that here was the reason for my being. So I came, and they hailed me the Steel Messiah, and so they came with me in their tattered caravan of old carriages and wagons. And as there can be only one Steel Messiah, alas we must now do battle.”

  Inspiration Cadillac sprang away from the speeding train with a pulse of pure jet power as Adam Black sent a circuit-fusing cybernetic command crackling along his superstructure. Inspiration Cadillac climbed to a safe altitude, then unleashed a bolt of purest God-power that severed the Poor Children’s shanty-coaches from the Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza. By the time the blasphemous train had applied emergency braking and ground to a halt, Inspiration Cadillac had spun a diamond-filament cable out of his feet and was towing his faithful back to Desolation Road. Adam Black blew white steam, reversed direction, and accelerated after the Poor Children.

  Inspiration Cadillac dropped his cargo and turned to meet his aggressor. Adam Black braked and stood pulsing with fusion power on the track.

  “Not here,” he said. “You will agree that the safety of the Poor Children is paramount?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Very well then.” Adam Black throttled up and accelerated along the westbound line. Inspiration Cadillac loosed a blistering command for his rival’s fusion engines to explode. Adam Black’s computerized defences effortlessly nullified the spell. Rocketman and trainman battled with commands and countercommands for fifty kilometres into the desert without success. For the next twenty kilometres they employed physical weaponry. Sonic clashed with sonic, missiles were met with swarms of robot killer bees, machine guns with roof-mounted laser turrets, limpet mines with robo-monkeys, lightning with lightning, claws with water cannon, servo-assisted punches with polymer foam, blasts of superheated steam with microwave bursts: the Total Mortifications battled until Desolation Road was no more than a memory over the eastern horizon.

  Then Inspiration Cadillac saw a dazzlesome flash far off on the edge of the world. It was followed by another flash, then another, then another, and in the blinking of a blinded eye he was embedded in a cone of white-hot light. Even as the realization of what Adam Black had done came to him, his chromed skin began to glow cherry red then scarlet, then yellow, and his circuits fused and ran like tar.

  —Most ingenious, redirecting ROTECH sky mirrors to focus on me. I didn’t think mine enemy was so resourceful. Brave thoughts but empty. He was now shining white-hot. Though they repaired themselves as rapidly as the heat destroyed them, his transmogrification circuits would hold only a matter of minutes before they dissolved. He tried to reach out and break Adam Black’s control of the Vanas but the locomotive will was too entrenched.

  He could feel his yet-human brain boiling in its metal skull.

  Then he had it.

  —One better, he cried to his fiery systems. One better. He summoned all his failing strength and reached into the sky, up, up, past the sky-mirrors and the orphs and the blitches and the habitats, to the world-bursting partacs. He slipped in, possesed the guidance and firing systems and aimed fifteen orbital subquarkal particle accelerators at Adam Black, a tiny hurtling flea on the skin of the round earth.

  In the instant before Inspiration Cadillac gave the command to fire, Adam Black guessed his strategy.

  “Stupid stupid stupid, the blast will destroy us both! No! Don’t!”

  “Yes yes yes!” cried Inspiration Cadillac as his sanity melted and his brain dissolved and he fired the partacs.

  In Desolation Road the people said it was like a second dawn: it was beautiful, they said. They had seen fifteen violet beams strike down from the sky like the justice of the Panarch and then the white blast, pure as virtue, had filled the western horizon for a whole two seconds. Beautiful, they said, beautiful… the afterblast had dyed the western lip of the world pink and blue and the insubstantial veils of auroral discharges had wavered like ghosts over the scene of the explosion. For a month after, Desolation Road was treated to stunningly beautiful sunsets.

  When the Poor Children returned, towing a rickety train of old carriages and rolling stock made from reprocessed favelas behind them, they brought with them the true story of the end of Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza and Inspiration Cadillac, Chamberlain of the Grey Lady, Total Mortification.

  “The world was not ready for Total Mortification,” they said. Chamberlain and chief engineer, cyberneticist and technician deliberated over the significance of what had happened at the western edge of the world, then gave the long-awaited and half-forgotten order that sent the Poor Children of
the Immaculate Contraption into Steeltown by dead of night to steal one of the abandoned and forgotten Class 88 steel haulers that had lain gathering rust and spiders since the days of the Great Strike.

  Under the leadership of the chamberlain and chief engineer, whose names were Plymouth Glyde and Spirit Dynamo, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption departed Desolation Road to pursue the still unresolved issue of machine rights. They steamed out of Desolation Road in the opposite direction to that from which they had come so many years before, because to go that way would have led them to a yawning hole in the desert, a crater of green glass where Adam Black’s aged tokamaks had exploded under the shriek of superaccelerated sub-quarkal beams from heaven and dispersed the atoms of man, machine and mortification into the beautiful sunset.

  66

  On dusty evenings when the summer lightning brought ephemeral life to the cracked neon tubes of the closed-up hotels and diners, Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das would sit on the porch to drink beer and remember.

  “Hey, remember Persis Tatterdemalion,” Rajandra Das would say.

  “She was a fine lady,” Mr. Jericho would reply, watching the lightning crackle along the horizon. “A fine fine lady,” and they would call to mind the colourful thread of history she had woven into the tale of Desolation Road until it reached an end with her flying off into the sunset after being lauded saviour of the town with her two sons on either wing in the cargo ’lighters bought at crash-out prices from the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The money from the sale of the Bar/Hotel had enabled her to hire two additional pilots: Callan and Venn Lefteremides, war scarred but intact after the attack on Desolation Road.

  “Wonder what she’s up to these days?” Rajandra Das would say, and Mr. Jericho would reply, “Flying still. Last thing I heard she had set up the Flying Circus over Transpolaris way, New Glasgow, I think, and she was making it pretty big.”

  Then Rajandra Das would say, “Wonder what Umberto and Louie are doing?”

  After the final battle, while the ROTECH time-security teams were tooth-combing Desolation Road for whatever it was that had so rudely shattered their contemplative peace, Persis Tatterdemalion had made it clear to the Gallacelli brothers that she had not returned for them but to gather her sons to her and sell the Bar/Hotel. The brothers’ one-and-only love for her had never been reciprocated. It was possible for three men to love the same ideal woman, but not for that one woman to love three men. So they packed all the years into cardboard suitcases along with their underpants, their documents, their cash boxes and Umberto’s collection of pornographic photo graphs. In the absence of trains (the Company was being tardy about repairing the gap in the line seventy kilometres due west due to disputes over the danger money payable on account of the radiation) an overland truck convoy took Umberto and Louie on to Meridian, where Umberto had established a real-estate business, selling plots of land in the Ecclesiastes Mountains and Louie leased an office from which to practice the business of lawyering, some years later obtaining a famous acquittal in the case of the Butcher of Llandridnodd Wells.

  “The old place was never the same after the war,” Rajandra Das would always say. This was a conversation he and Mr. Jericho had held so many times that it had passed through the meaningless mumbles of prayers and responses into renewed meaningfulness. “When the folks went, the place just died.”

  First the pilgrims and the Holy Children, then the gentlemen of the media. Next, the hoteliers, hostel keepers and restaurateurs who had sheltered, fed and watered them. Then, blown away in a day and a night, the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, blown away in a hurricane of tumbling profit margins and drawn knives up in the lofty troposphere of the executive levels as the scandal of the robot duplicates was gradually unearthed, like buried excrement. All its labour units, its managers and section overseers, all were dispersed like so much red dust across the face of the planet. Finally, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption, after the Battle of the Prophets blew a ten-megaton hole in the Meridian-Pandemonium mainline. And last of all, jean-Michel Gastineau, the Most Sarcastic Man in the World, sarcasm forever blunted, went home to his woods and glens in haunted Chryse.

  “And what did it all achieve?” Rajandra Das would finally ask. By timehonoured tradition Mr. Jericho refrained from reply though he perhaps knew better then anyone else left in Desolation Road. “Nothing,” Rajandra Das would self-answer. “I tell you, all that praying and marching and striking, all that fighting and bloodshed and days and nights of fear, what did it get them? Nothing. Nothing at all. Waste of time, energy, lives.”

  Mr. Jericho did not speak of words like “principles” or “absolutes” when Rajandra Das vilified Concordat’s failure to win a true victory over Bethlehem Ares Steel, for he was no longer sure he believed in absolutes or principles. To him the collapse of the company and thus of Desolation Road was of little consequence so long as the sun kept shining, the crops kept growing, and the occasional rains kept falling from heaven. His belief in Desolation Road was more selfish than Rajandra Das’s. He liked to think it was also more realistic. He remembered the first day it had ever rained. Fifteen years had gone past since then. Time passed by so soon. There was an irrational fear wandering around inside him that Desolation Road might vanish entirely from existence and he would not notice the difference. The people had gone, the shops had closed, the banks transferred their credit back to the big cities of the Grand Valley, the lawyers, hairdressers, mechanics, counsellors, doctors, had left the same day the railroad was repaired; all that remained were the farms and the solar panels and the creaking wind-pumps and the empty empty streets. These days the trains called only once a week, if even that. Everything was as it had been at the beginning. History had stopped for Desolation Road and Desolation Road was thankful for it.

  One day as the two men sat in their leather chairs watching the desert dust whip along the street, Rajandra Das said, “You know, I suppose I mustn’t have been the marriageable type.”

  Mr. Jericho did not know what he meant.

  “I always thought one of those Pentecost sisters would lay ahold of me, but they never did. Funny thing. I always reckoned they would. Well, now they’re away God knows where, and here I am, without a wife, without a farm, with only a token half-share in the porch I’m sitting on. Haven’t even got my charm over machines, that got took back; what I am is a bum again. Maybe that’s what I always was, that’s why they never married me.”

  “You thinking of leaving?” asked Mr. Jericho. He had known Rajandra Das long enough to read his heart like a railroad timetable.

  “There’s nothing holding me here, least of all this place. You see, I always wanted to see Wisdom, those sparklin’ towers beside the Syrtic Sea.”

  “Should have asked Miss Quinsana to take you back with her.”

  Rajandra Das spat at the moonring.

  “She wouldn’t give me a wipe of her ass now and she ain’t worth one of mine. No, if I go, I want to go on my own. I’ve got time enough to learn to be a bum again and I’m old enough to enjoy that time. No future to worry about.”

  Mr. Jericho looked into the heavens. The stars seemed close enough to touch that night.

  “Maybe I should go with you,” he mused. “I always said I was just passing through.” But he stayed and Rajandra Das found himself running up on the blindside of a slow early-morning ore train. As he swung onto the wagon-plate and scrambled up the ladder onto the top of the car, he felt the years fall away. This was what he had meant to do all his life. He was the Bum Eternal, the archetype of the Travelling Man. He had just taken a long wait between trains.

  For a year and a day he roamed the world’s interesting places, sending back picture postcards of himself standing by the Chasm of Lyx or in the floating flower market of Llangonedd or squatting outside the legendary Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar on Belladonna’s Sorrowful Street. Kaan Mandella pinned the postcards up around the back-bar mirror for all citizens to see and wonder upon. Then one Thursday
Rajandra Das succumbed to the urge that he had successfully resisted for the year and the day and went to Wisdom, the most beautiful city in the world. He had resisted the temptation for so long because he feared he might be disappointed, but as he walked the shining boulevards and gazed on mighty bridges and towers and took his siesta (agreeable habits dying hard) in a cafe beneath the shade of the bo trees lining Nevsky Prospect and dined in the waterside seafood restaurants and rode a tram to the top of each of the nineteen hills, it was all as he had imagined, glorious in every detail. He wrote card after card of glowing praise to Mr. Jericho.

  “This is the most wonderful place in the world,” he wrote in his final card from Wisdom, “but I can’t stay here forever. There’s other places to see and there’s always Wisdom to come back to. It’s not going anywhere. If I’m passing through, I’ll pay you a call.”

  It was Rajandra Das’s final card from anywhere. Riding back to Llangonedd and wondering where he might go that would satisfy him after the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition, a tickle of dust prickled his nose. A sudden fit of sneezing seized him and he sneezed out his last little drop of power over machinery. He lost his grip on the bogie, fell with a small cry under the wheels of the Wisdom-Llangonedd Syrtis Express, and died.

  On the day that Mr. Jericho received his final postcard, a train arrived in Desolation Road. Since the town died, this was a sufficiently unusual event for the entire citizenry to turn out and welcome it. Most trains thundered through at 400 km/hr., leaving dust and flying pebbles as souvenirs. Even more unusual than the train’s stopping; two passengers stepped off. Apart from traveling salesmen and gullible tourists whom Kaan Mandella lured to the Bar/Hotel with the promise of trips to the geological curiosities of the Crystal Land, the rule was that people always got on trains at Desolation Road. These passengers did not look like salesmen or tourists. They wore kneelength silk jackets of the kind that had recently become fashionable in the Big Cities. They wore high-heeled hand-tooled leather gaucho boots and upon their heads were wide-brimmed round cardinal hats. They looked like killers.